Before we start building the program, here's one non-Linux tip: if your PC
does not have a built-in IEEE1394 card or if you wish to buy an extra IEEE card,
try to find one with an IEEE1394 cable--it is cheaper in the long run. If you do
buy a cable separately, remember that a nice-looking cable labeled Sony in a video
shop may cost much more than an ordinary one labeled 1394 in a computer shop, but
there are no differences in how they work.

Tip: Installing from Source

Kino is not a monolith program, but it does call some extra stuff and uses many
libraries while running. A tree of the main dependencies is shown below in Figure 1.
In order to compile Kino successfully, you have to install all the needed packages
beforehand and compile them from source. Hopefully, the configuration script will help
you determine the required software.

Figure 1. Kino Main Dependencies Tree

Start by finding the recent sources on
SourceForge.net
and loading them. Unzip and untar the file and follow the README instructions.
By running the ./configure script, you can learn in detail all that you have to add to
your machine in order to compile Kino successfully. You need to install the missing components
according to the distribution. In such cases, you have to install with run-time libraries
the corresponding files for developers, such packages contain "devel" or something similar
in their names.

As a rule of thumb, the newer the version of Kino you want to compile,
the newer libraries you need to install or update. Some of them may be not
available for your distribution at all. In such cases, you have to compile
the libraries from source or find pre-compiled ones. More details on this step are offered below, in
"Installing from Packages".

If the ./configure script finishes without errors, run make and then
make install. If a problem arises with the make scripts, an error
message gives you complete information about what happened. The README file also can
help you finding the reason for the unsuccessful compilation.

Tip: Installing Plugins from Source

Kino plugins timfx
timfx and
dvtitler
provide some extra functions. The process of installing timfx requires a C++ interface and
signal framework libraries. On SuSE, you probably will not have any problems
compiling this module, but it's possible that you may need to point to the Kino header
location:

Compiling dvtitler is a similar process--do not forget to load the grey-scaled
images for the timfx Luma effect. They are located
here.
Knowing how these images work can help you develop your own interesting effects.

Tip: Using Packages from LJ FTP Site

In order to simplify installing all of these libraries, we created tarballs containing all
the necessary packages for SuSE 9.1 and for Fedora Core 2.
The SuSE 9.1 tarball can be found
here,
and the Fedora Core 2 tarball can be found
here.
Using these tarballs, we suggest the following procedure for installing Kino:

Load all packages according to your distribution, as outlined in
Tables 1 and 2. Some packages from the tables are not included in the standard
distributions, and some of them we compiled specifically for use with Kino. To
install them as root, issue the command rpm -i foo, where foo is the packages'
filenames. To upgrade, use rpm -U foo instead.

Try to install Kino with the command rpm -U foo, where foo is the Kino
package name according to the distribution. It is kino-0.7.3-2.i586.rpm
for SuSE and kino-0.7.3-2.i386.rpm for Fedora Core 2.

If rpm complains that you missed something in the system, read the rpm output and
install or upgrade the necessary programs.

For SuSE, simply install timfx and dvtitler with rpm; use
timfx-0.2.1-2.i586.rpm and dvtitler-0.1.1-1.i586.rpm.
For Fedora Core 2, first install the two packages not available in
the standard release, as noted in Table 3. After that, install the plugin
packages, timfx-0.2.1-2.i386.rpm and dvtitler-0.1.1-1.i386.rpm.

Comment viewing options

I tried everything but timfx doesn't work, I run the .rpm, it says all teh dependencies are satisfied, it installs with no problem. When I go inside Kino and open the FX dropdown the new options from timfx are not there.

I have a digital camera that also takes short videos in avi format. I'd like to edit these in Kino. Is there any way to convert these to dv? I have converted some to mpeg with ffmpeg. However the documentation does not explain how to convert to dv.

First, start A new project and save it the name you want. Make sure that you have set the tmp directory to a place that has enough memory. Next, click on the "Insert a file befor the current seen" button. Select the file you wish to convert. You should get a dialog box asking you if you'd like to convert the file to a DV file. Click Yes. Wait untill the progress window closes. Now, go to the same place you're origonal file was located. There should be the converted dv file. Things should go smoothly from there.

PS: If something doesn't work, you might want to load Kino in the terminal window. That way, you can see any errors that might happen. I just spent a few hours trying to convert an avi file and then realized that it was creating the file on my SD card. (The dv file was almost tripple the size of the original AVI file and didn't have enough room for it to be created on the card.)

--

But seriously though.. They REALLY need some better documentation on the kino website. I just downloaded this program today and couldn't get it to work for the longest time. I can't believe that it was something so simple. O_O;

First, start A new project and save it the name you want. Make sure that you have set the tmp directory to a place that has enough memory. Next, click on the "Insert a file befor the current seen" button. Select the file you wish to convert. You should get a dialog box asking you if you'd like to convert the file to a DV file. Click Yes. Wait untill the progress window closes. Now, go to the same place you're origonal file was located. There should be the converted dv file. Things should go smoothly from there.

PS: If something doesn't work, you might want to load Kino in the terminal window. That way, you can see any errors that might happen. I just spent a few hours trying to convert an avi file and then realized that it was creating the file on my SD card. (The dv file was almost tripple the size of the original AVI file and didn't have enough room for it to be created on the card.)

--

But seriously though.. They REALLY need some better documentation on the kino website. I just downloaded this program today and couldn't get it to work for the longest time. I can't believe that it was something so simple. O_O;

I know. The silence is deafening - not a single solution anywhere on the internet. The whole entire video topic is a screaming bloody digusting mess - front to back - left to right.
If someone could sort it out that would be very very great.
Right now it totally sucks.

No kidding. Linux could be a first rate video processing tool. But instead it almost unusable.

Trivial tasks like converting a DVD to MP4 or editing a home movie are almost impossible. Heck, you can't even watch a DVD, how do you expect that to be taken seriously in the real world?

Come on google, IMB, ubuntu, HP, Sun etc etc - this is a problem that needs to be solved. It is very sad to see such a beautiful operating system in such an unusable state because of a few licensing issues.

You can buy a DVD player for a few bucks these days. The manufacturer had to deal with both mpegla and css. How difficult could it be for the might of the OS community to solve they same legal problems on Linux?

No kidding. Linux could be a first rate video processing tool. But instead it almost unusable.

Trivial tasks like converting a DVD to MP4 or editing a home movie are almost impossible. Heck, you can't even watch a DVD, how do you expect that to be taken seriously in the real world?

Come on google, IMB, ubuntu, HP, Sun etc etc - this is a problem that needs to be solved. It is very sad to see such a beautiful operating system in such an unusable state because of a few licensing issues.

You can buy a DVD player for a few bucks these days. The manufacturer had to deal with both mpegla and css. How difficult could it be for the might of the OS community to solve they same legal problems on Linux?

Thank for your articles.
I'm on SuSE 9.2. I can't find the latest source or a SuSE9.2 rpm anywhere for dvtitler. I get a 404 on trying to download from http://kino.schirmacher.de/article/view/79/1/11/ . I therefore tried the rpm for SuSE9.1 fromhttp://www.ictp.trieste.it/~tiger/kino.html
But it does not appear to work because I do not get the dvtitler UI option as shown in figure 8 on page 60 of the LinuxJournal Dec 2004.
How does Kino find plugins? The above rpm installed dvtitler in /usr/lib/kino-gtk2/. On SuSE 9.2 Kino is installed under /opt/gnome/ and has config file ~/.gnome2/kino. I was hoping in the latter to find something like plugin= but no luck.

The "configure" and "make" errored on my first attempts because of various missing packages. I installed those using YaST and then repeated the above steps.

Lastly I installed dvtitler as follows
su
make install

Kino looks in directory kino-gtk2 in /opt/gnome/lib for plugins. This appears to be the only mechanism. I therefore added a symlink from there to where it actually is as follows
ln -s /opt/dvtitler/lib/kino-gtk2 /opt/gnome/lib/
exit

The dvtitler UI option in Kino is at the bottom of the popup menu that shows when clicking the bar under "Video Filter" under the "FX" tab. I tried it and it works. Nice.

I started on the same for timfx but it requires as lot more packages installed before it will build successfully. I'll defer for now.

well done , I had a similar problem after successfully compiling dvtitler in not being able to findit! On my own system the following was needed to create the appropriate symbolic link.(SuSE 9.2 x86-64)

In the above I said I'd defer timfx for now. I just finished installing it on SuSE9.2. Here's what I did. It's not that much or hard after all.
The biggest trouble is that timfx requires 3 packages that neither SuSE nor anyone else offers readily available for install on SuSE9.2. They are the ones listed at the bottom ofhttp://www.mathematik.uni-wuerzburg.de/~vaeth/specs/
Thank you very much to the author for that page which I followed.

Next, build timfx much like dvtitler.
First I downloaded timfx-0.2.2.tar.gz from the link at the bottom ofhttp://sourceforge.net/projects/kino/
to my home directory.
Then I built it for install in /opt/timfx as follows

As with dvtitler, if the above complains because of other missing packages then
install those packages using YaST and repeat the above starting at "cd".

Lastly, I installed it
su
make install

As with dvtitler, because I chose to install in /opt/timfx rather than /opt/gnome (because of fear of what the install of a new and unknown program may do to my system) then a symlink is necessary from where Kino expects to find plugins to where they actually are
ln -s /opt/timfx/lib/kino-gtk2/libtimfx.so /opt/gnome/lib/kino-gtk2
exit

Alternatively, if I'd used --prefix=/opt/gnome then timfx would have gotten installed where Kino expects to find it leaving no need for a symlink.

Correction: The symlink command I used for dvtitler should have been
ln -s /opt/dvtitler/lib/kino-gtk2/libdvtitler.so /opt/gnome/lib/kino-gtk2

Out of the Tip: Using Packages from LJ FTP Site above:
"For SuSE, simply install timfx and dvtitler with rpm; use timfx-0.2.1-2.i586.rpm and dvtitler-0.1.1-1.i586.rpm. For Fedora Core 2, first install the two packages not available in the standard release, as noted in Table 3. After that, install the plugin packages, timfx-0.2.1-2.i386.rpm and dvtitler-0.1.1-1.i386.rpm."

There is no timfx.rpm nor dvdtitler.rpm within the Suse package?
And I can't find those rpm's at the ftp-site (ftp://ftp.ssc.com/pub/lj/). There are only the files according table 1??
Please advize.

Make sure you have drivers installed for your video card. Fedora Core 2, for example, was using a generic driver for my video card. The manufacturer's driver was much faster. Check the manufacturer's web site for drivers.

This is more of a question than a comment. I have a very usable Sony High 8 video camera (non digital) and quite a few reels of tape. Can I use Kino to edit my videos? What type of video card can I use instead of the IEEE1394 (firewire) interface?

Most the the new miniDV cameras have a "pass through" feature where you can connect an analog signal to the camera and it will "pass it through" ot the IEEE1394 output. In terms of quality I've not seen a better video analog to digital converter than my Sony camera. Expensive?? Well maybe but a used and usable camera can be bought for about $250.00 There is no need to buy a top of the line camera for use on your desk. The quality is the same. Also I've found that miniDV camera make _very_ excelent audio recorder and analog converter. A cheap used camera for use at the computer may actually pay for itself in reduced wear the taer on your expensive shooting camera. Unlike analog cameras, a low end digital camera will perform playback functions _exactly_ as well as the high end camera.

You asked about using something else for inputting video other than ieee1394... I've found that once you get it working, it's almost flawless. I've been using the ADS pyro a/v link, which gives you ieee1394 both in and out, and it's been wonderful.

I've used the V4L setup, but it doesn't work as smoothly and effortlessly (once it's up and running, of course) as ieee1394 does. It drops frames, and frequently doesn't sync properly, up to a couple of seconds off, in my experience.

The pyro device has both composite ins and outs on it, so either way will work, and I've seen them for well under a hundred $$. I personally recommend it over the V4L approach.